Jerome "Jay" Apt
Professor Emeritus Carnegie Mellon University
- Pittsburgh PA
Jay Apt is an emeritus professor at the Tepper School of Business and in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy.
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Media Appearances
When severe weather hits, the public turns to this site mapping power outages
CNN tv
2025-03-04
When big storms cause power outages, people use PowerOutage.US, a website to see where the power is out across the country. According to Jay Apt, (Tepper School of Business) who has researched the reliability of the electric power grid, the site uses tech that is based in part on the rise of “smart meters” - devices that measure power usage and report remotely to both the power customer and utility.
U.S. natural gas pipelines vulnerable to electric outages
CMU Engineering online
“In contrast to well-established reliability reporting and standards for the electrical system, the gas system has almost no reliability transparency or oversight,” says study co-author Jay Apt, an emeritus professor of engineering and public policy and business. “Establishing a federal gas reliability organization, comparable to what is now done for electric power, could improve gas reliability by establishing appropriate reliability reporting, incident investigation, and minimum industry standards.”
An urgent plan to decarbonize electricity by 2035
The Hill online
2021-09-09
We applaud the Biden administration’s goal of completely decarbonizing the U.S. electricity system by 2035. Achieving that, while keeping power affordable and reliable, will be an enormous but feasible undertaking requiring a continuous push for the next 14 years.
The House That Launched an Astronaut’s Career
The Wall Street Journal online
2020-06-24
EPP’s Jay Apt was interviewed for a story in The Wall Street Journal featuring his family’s historic home in Pittsburgh, which is on the market for the first time since it was built for his family in the 1950s.
‘The Current War: Director’s Cut’ shows how the electric power system we take for granted came to be
The Conversation online
2019-10-30
Many experts view the electric power grid as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. But if Thomas Edison, inventor of the first commercial power plant, had had his way, the modern grid would not have been built. Instead the U.S. would have been powered by numerous coal-burning power plants, spaced a mile or so apart, with no electricity at all in rural areas.
Microbursts in Cleveland Heights unexplainable, but power outages are on the rise
Cleveland.com online
2019-09-16
It’s impossible to completely make a power grid impervious to severe storm damage, Carnegie Mellon University professor Jay Apt said. “It is simply not possible to ensure that the power grid can withstand any weather event,” Apt said. “You can make things pretty good, but making them invulnerable is a fool’s errand."
Media
Industry Expertise
Accomplishments
Metcalf Lifetime Achievement Award
2002
NASA Distinguished Service Medal
1997
Education
Harvard College
B.A.
Physics
1971
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D.
Experimental Atomic Physics
1976
Affiliations
- American Association for the Advancement of Science : Fellow
- Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making
- Electricity Industry Center
- Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation
Links
Articles
Using PV inverters for voltage support at night can lower grid costs
Energy Reports2022
Areas with sparse transmission lines are common in regions with high solar energy potential and need voltage support. This may require installing expensive voltage compensators, such as static synchronous compensators (STATCOMs). This expense can increase the cost and decrease the acceptance of large-scale adoption of solar power. Unlike current photovoltaic (PV) inverter controllers, which provide voltage support only during the day, commercially available augmented voltage controllers can provide voltage support at night.
Energy from the Wind and the Sun
Interdisciplinary Research on Climate and Energy Decision Making2022
This chapter describes extensive work by Jay Apt and colleagues on the variable nature of wind and solar energy resources, including power spectral analysis (explained in lay terms), and work on the extent to which combining generation from physically distributed locations can smooth and improve the reliability from wind or solar generated electricity. This work gave rise to the Variable Renewable Energy and the Electricity Grid (RFF/Routledge, 2014).
Making Electric Power More Resilient
Interdisciplinary Research on Climate and Energy Decision Making2022
Large electric power outages of long duration are more common than one might expect. This chapter discusses the causes of such outages – including outages resulting from extreme events made worse by climate change, such as heat, cold, and tropical cyclones. It describes the pioneering work we did with a huge database of all the generator failures in the largest portion of the U.S. grid, showing that, contrary to the assumption that grid operators make, that failures will be random, when they calculate how many reserve generators must be online, many generators have failed all at once during hot or cold weather.
How vulnerable are US natural gas pipelines to electric outages?
The Electricity Journal2023
Gas-electric interdependencies have contributed to several major electric system emergencies. Natural gas pipelines use both gas-powered and electric-powered compressor units; power outages at the latter can cause gas shortages. We make the first rigorous identification of the number of US electric compressor stations, finding that 10% are electric.
Inverter fast frequency response is a low-cost alternative to system inertia
Electric Power Systems Research2023
Electric grids with high penetrations of utility-scale inverter-based resources (IBRs), such as wind, solar, and batteries, often have lower system inertia and need frequency support. One response is to keep traditional synchronous generators online to maintain adequate system inertia, which may reduce the number of IBRs on the system, increasing system emissions.
